The Keeper

by Luke Delaney

  They were the last words he spoke, although he may have said ‘please’ a little later. By then the blood bubbling up into his mouth made it just a gargle.

  With a smooth, swift, practised hand I grabbed an iron statue of a naked Indian he kept on his side table and I used it to smash his skull, not hitting him hard enough to kill him straight away, merely to render him semi-conscious and virtually paralysed. He had been on his knees when I hit him, which was good – less distance to fall meant less noise when he hit the floor.

  I watched him for a while, standing over him like the victor in a prizefight, watching his chest rise and fall with each painful, strained breath, the blood initially spurting from the wound in his head, then slowing to a steady flow as his heart grew too weak to pump it at the pressure his body required to stay alive. Every few seconds his right leg would twitch like a dying bird.

  It wouldn’t have been as I had dreamed if he hadn’t been at least partly conscious when I went to him with an ice pick I found in his drinks cabinet. I needed him to be alive as I cut him. I needed to see him try to stop me each time I pushed the ice pick into his dying body: not stabbing frenziedly, but placing it deliberately against his pale skin before pushing the point through with a deliciously satisfying popping sound. Now and then he would reach up and pitifully try to defend himself from the torture. I told him not to be a naughty boy and continued with my work. It was a shame his brain haemorrhaging had caused his eyes to turn red, as I had wanted to contrast his blue eyes against the pale bloodied skin. Next time I’d do better.

  His perforated body almost began to disgust me, to make me want to flee from the scene, but I couldn’t stop yet. Not until all was as close as it could be to how I had seen it in my mind the first time I knew I would be visiting him. I would continue with my work, despite the foul stench emanating from the holes in his stomach and intestines, the urine and excreta that were now leaking from his transformed body.

  He held on for forty minutes, his eyes flickering slightly open for a few minutes at a time. When they were open I did my work, stopping whenever he passed out, unable to bear the pain or grasp his situation. I had to punch him in the face every so often to stop him calling out. Not that he could have realistically raised more than a whimper. Still, I had to be sure.

  When he finally died, a slow, quiet hiss of air escaping from his lips and the breaches in his chest wall told me that my fun had come to an end. I put on a clean pair of surgical gloves and took the three hundred pounds cash I had given him earlier from his trouser pocket. I really didn’t want to leave that behind. I carefully and quietly broke apart some furniture and generally arranged the room as if a violent struggle had occurred. Next I used the syringe I’d brought to draw blood from his mouth and sprayed it about the room: on the walls, over the furniture, the carpet, making spray patterns to suggest a violent struggle had taken place. Then I moved to the corner of the room I had left clean. I removed my clothes and put them inside a plastic bag and put that bag inside another plastic bag and repeated this twice more. I ensured each plastic bag was tied securely and finally put them in my rucksack. I put new plastic bags on my feet, not wanting to take the chance that I might step on a spot of blood – that sort of evidence can be difficult to explain. I put on another clean pair of rubber surgical gloves and left the living room. I would burn the lot in my garden the following evening, the safest way to dispose of such incriminating items. To burn them in a public place risked attracting attention, while burial would leave them at the mercy of inquisitive animals.

  I moved quietly to the front door. I took the plastic bags off my shoes and looked through the spyhole. Nobody about. Just to be sure, I listened at the door, careful not to let my ear press against it and possibly leave a mark like a fingerprint, which I hear can happen.

  When I was totally happy I slipped out of the flat, leaving the front door open so as not to make any more noise than necessary. The statue of the Indian and the ice pick I threw in the Thames as I headed north to my hotel. The thought of the police wasting hours searching for weapons that wouldn’t help their investigation in the slightest pleased me.

  When I reached my hotel I slipped in through the side door next to the bar, only generally used as a fire exit. I knew it could open from the outside and had no CCTV camera trained on it. I already had the key card for my room, having checked in earlier that day. I took a long shower, keeping the water as hot as I could bear, scrubbing skin, nails and hair vigorously with a nail brush until my entire body felt like it had been burned by flames. I had removed the plug cover to allow any items washed from my body to flow easily into London’s sewage system. After the shower I took a long steaming bath and scrubbed myself again. Once dry, I lay naked on the bed and drank two bottles of water, at peace now. Satisfied. Soon sleep came and I dreamed the same beautiful dream over and over.

  2

  Thursday morning

  It was 3 a.m. and Detective Inspector Sean Corrigan drove through the dreary streets of New Cross, south-east London. He had been born and raised in nearby Dulwich, and for as long as he could remember, these streets had been a dangerous place. People could quickly become victims here, regardless of age, sex or colour. Life had little value.

  But these worries were for other people, not Sean. They were for the people who had nine-to-five jobs in shops and offices. Those who arrived bleary-eyed to work each morning, then scuttled home nervously every evening, only feeling safe once they’d bolted themselves behind closed doors.

  Sean didn’t fear the streets, having dealt with the worst they could throw at him. He was a detective inspector in charge of one of South London’s Murder Investigation Teams, dedicated to dealing with violent death. The killers hunted their victims and Sean hunted them. He drove with the window down and doors unlocked.

  Less than an hour earlier he’d been asleep at home when Detective Sergeant Dave Donnelly called. There’d been a murder. A bad one. A young man beaten and stabbed to death in his own flat. One minute Sean was lying by his wife’s side, the next he was driving to the place where a young man’s life had been torn away.

  He found the address without difficulty. The streets around the murder scene were eerily quiet. He was pleased to see the uniformed officers had done their job properly and taped off a large cordon around the block the flat was in. He’d been to scenes before where the cordon started and stopped at the front door. How much evidence had been carried away from scenes on the soles of shoes? He didn’t want to think about it.

  There were two marked patrol cars alongside Donnelly’s unmarked Ford. He always laughed at the murder scenes on television, with dozens of police cars parked outside, all with blue lights swirling away. Inside, dozens of detectives and forensic guys would be falling over each other. Reality was different. Entirely different.

  Real crime scenes were all the more disturbing for their quietness – the violent death of the victim would leave the atmosphere shattered and brutalised. Sean could feel the horror closing in around him as he examined a scene. It was his job to discover the details of death and over time he had grown hardened to it, but not immune. He knew that this scene would be no different.

  He parked outside the taped-off cordon and climbed from the isolation of his car into the warm loneliness of the night, the stars of the clear sky and the street lights removing all illusion of darkness. If he had been anyone else, doing any other job, he might have noticed how beautiful it was, but such thoughts had no place here. He flashed his warrant card to the approaching uniformed officer and grunted his name. ‘DI Sean Corrigan, Serious Crime Group South. Where’s this flat?’

  The uniformed officer was young. He seemed afraid of Sean. He must be new if a mere detective inspector scared him. ‘Number sixteen Tabard House, sir. It’s on the second floor, up the stairs and turn right. Or you could take the lift.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Sean opened the boot of his car and cast a quick glance over the contents squeezed
inside. Two large square plastic bins contained all he would need for an initial scene examination. Paper suits and slippers. Various sizes of plastic exhibit bags, paper bags for clothing, half a dozen boxes of plastic gloves, rolls of sticky labels and of course a sledgehammer, a crowbar and other tools. The boot of Sean’s car would be mirrored by detectives’ cars across the world.

  He pulled on a forensic containment suit and headed towards the stairwell. The block was of a type common to this area of London. Low-rise tenement blocks made from dark, oppressive, brown-grey brick which had been thrown up after the Second World War to house those bombed out of old slum areas. In their time they’d been a revelation – indoor toilets, running water, heating – but now only those trapped in poverty lived in them. They looked like prisons, and in a way that’s what they were.

  The stairwell smelled of urine. The stench of humanity living on top of each other was unmistakable. This was summer and the vents of the flats pumped out the smells from within. Sean almost gagged on it, the sight, sound and smell of the tenement block reminding him all too vividly of his own childhood, living in a three-bedroom, council owned maisonette with his mother, two brothers, two sisters and his father – his father who would lead him away from the others, taking him to the upstairs bedroom where things would happen. His mother too frightened to intervene – thoughts of reaching for a knife in the kitchen drawer swirling in her head, but fading away as her courage deserted her. But the curse of his childhood had left him a rare and dark insightfulness – an ability to understand the motivation of those he hunted.

  All too often the abused become the abusers as the darkness overtakes them, evil begetting evil – a terrible cycle of violence, virtually impossible to break – and so the demons of Sean’s past were too deeply assimilated in his being to ever be rid of. But Sean was different in that he could control his demons and his rage, using his shattered upbringing to allow him insights that other cops could only dream of into the crimes he investigated. He understood the killers, rapists and arsonists – understood why they had to do what they did, could interpret their motivation – see what they had seen, smell what they had smelt, feel what they had felt – their excitement, power, lust, revulsion, guilt, regret, fear. He could make leaps in investigations others struggled to understand, filling in the blanks with his unique imagination. Crime scenes came alive in his mind’s eye, playing in his head like a movie. He was no psychic or clairvoyant, he was just a cop – but a cop with a broken past and dangerous future, his skill at reading the ones he hunted born of his own dark, haunted past. Where better for a failed disciple of true evil to hide than amongst cops? Where better to turn his unique tools to good use than the police? He swallowed the bile rising in his throat and headed for the crime scene – the murder scene.

  Sean stopped briefly to acknowledge another uniformed officer posted at the front door of the flat. The constable lifted the tape across the door and watched him duck inside. He looked down the corridor of the flat. It was bigger than it had seemed from the outside. Detective Sergeant Donnelly waited for him, his large frame filling the doorway, his moustache all but concealing the movement of his lips as he talked. Dave Donnelly, twenty-year plus veteran of the Metropolitan Police and very much Sean’s old school right-hand man. His anchor to the logical and practical course of an investigation and part-time crutch to lean on. They’d had their run-ins and disagreements, but they understood each other – they trusted each other.

  ‘Morning, guv’nor. Stick to the right of the hallway here. That’s the route I’ve been taking in and out,’ Donnelly growled in his strange accent, a mix of Glaswegian and Cockney, his moustache twitching as he spoke.

  ‘What we got?’ Sean asked matter-of-factly.

  ‘No sign of forced entry. Security is good in the flat, so he probably let the killer in. All the damage to the victim seems to have been done in the living room. A real fucking mess in there. No signs of disturbance anywhere else. The living room is the last door on the right down the corridor. Other than that we’ve got a kitchen, two bedrooms, a separate bathroom and toilet. From what I’ve seen, the victim kept things reasonably clean and tidy. Decent taste in furniture. There’s a few photies of the victim around the place – as best I can tell, anyway. His injuries make it a wee bit difficult to be absolutely sure. There’s plenty of them with him, shall we say, embracing other men.’

  ‘Gay?’ Sean asked.

  ‘Looks that way. It’s early days, but there’s definitely some decent hi-fi and TV stuff around the place, and I notice several of the photies have our boy in far-flung corners of the world. Must have cost a few pennies. We’re not dealing with a complete loser here. He had a decent enough job, or he was a decent enough villain, although I don’t get the feel this is a villain’s home.’ Both men craned their heads around the hallway area, as if to confirm Donnelly’s assessment so far. He continued: ‘And I’ve found a few letters all addressed to a Daniel Graydon. Nothing for anyone else.’

  ‘Well, Daniel Graydon,’ Sean asked, ‘what the hell happened to you? And why?’

  ‘Shall we?’ With an outstretched hand pointing along the corridor, Donnelly invited Sean to continue.

  They moved from room to room, leaving the living room to the end. They trod carefully, moving around the edges so as not to disturb any invisible footprint indentations left in the carpets or minute but vital evidence: a strand of hair, a tiny drop of blood. Occasionally Sean would take a photograph with his small digital camera. He would keep the photographs for his personal use only, to remind him of details he had seen, but also to put himself back at the scene any time he needed to sense it again, to smell the odour of blood, to taste the sickly sweet flavour of death. To feel the killer’s presence. He wished he could be alone in the flat, without the distraction of having to talk to anyone – to explain what he was seeing and feeling. It had been the same ever since he was a young cop, his ability to step into the shoes of the offender, be it a residential burglary or murder. But only the more alarming scenes seemed to trigger this reaction. Walking around scenes of domestic murders or gangland stabbings he saw more than most other detectives, but felt no more than they did. This scene already seemed different. He wished he was alone.

  Sean felt uncomfortable in the flat. Like an intruder. As if he should be constantly apologizing for being there. He shook off the feeling and mentally absorbed everything. The cleanliness of the furniture and the floors. Were the dishes washed and put away? Had any food been left out? Did anything, no matter how small, seem somehow out of place? If the victim kept his clothing neatly folded away, then a shirt on the floor would alert Sean’s curiosity. If the victim had lived in squalor, a freshly cleaned glass next to a sink full of dirty dishes would attract his eye. Indeed, Sean had already noted something amiss.

  Sean and Donnelly came to the living room. The door was ajar, exactly how it had been found by the young constable. Donnelly moved inside. Sean followed.

  There was a strong smell of blood – a lot of blood. It was a metallic smell. Like hot copper. Sean recalled the times he’d tasted his own blood. It always made him think that it tasted exactly like it smelled. At least this man had been killed recently. It was summer now – if the victim had been there for a few days the flat would have reeked. Flies would have filled the room, maggots infesting the body. He felt a jolt of guilt for being glad the man had just been killed.

  Sean crouched next to the body, careful to avoid stepping in the pool of thick burgundy blood that had formed around the victim’s head. He’d seen many murder victims. Some had almost no wounds to speak of, others had terrible injuries. This was a bad one. As bad as he’d seen.

  ‘Jesus Christ. What the hell happened in this room?’ Sean asked.

  Donnelly looked around. The dining-room table was overturned. Two of the chairs with it had been destroyed. The TV had been knocked from its stand. Pictures lay smashed on the floor. CDs were strewn around the room. The lights from the CD player
blinked in green.

  ‘Must have been a hell of a fight,’ Donnelly said.

  Sean stood up, unable to look away from the victim: a white male, about twenty years old, naked from the waist up, wearing hipster jeans that were heavily soaked in blood. One sock remained on his right foot, the other was nowhere to be seen. He was lying on his back, the left leg bent under the right, with both arms stretched out in a crucifix position. There were no restraints of any kind in evidence. The left side of his face and head had been caved in. The victim’s light hair allowed Sean to see two serious head wounds indicating horrific fractures to the skull. Both eyes were swollen almost completely shut and his nose was smashed, with congealed blood clustered around it. The mouth hadn’t escaped punishment, the lips showing several deep cuts, with the jaw hanging dislocated. Sean wondered how many teeth would be missing. The right ear was nowhere to be seen. He hoped to God the man had died from the first blow to his head, but he doubted it.

  The pool of blood by the victim’s head was the only heavy saturation area other than his clothing. Elsewhere there were dozens of splash marks: on the walls, furniture and carpet. Sean imagined the victim’s head being whipped around by the ferocity of the blows, the blood from his wounds travelling in a fine spray through the air until it landed where it now remained. Once examined properly, these splash marks should provide a useful map of how the attack had developed.

  The victim’s body had not been spared. Sean wasn’t about to start counting, but there must have been at least fifty to a hundred stab wounds. The legs, abdomen, chest and arms had all been brutally attacked. Sean looked around for weapons, but could see none. He returned his gaze to the shattered body, trying to free his mind, to see what had happened to the young man now lying dead on his own floor. For the most fleeting of moments he saw a figure hunched over the dying man, something that resembled a screwdriver rather than a knife gripped in his hand, but the image was gone as quickly as it arrived. Finally he managed to look away and speak.